Papa's Home!

Papa has just returned from seven months in France.  We missed him lots and lots, but he's back for good now and we are enjoying every minute!  The Boy has spent hours helping Papa repair and make all sorts of awesome things in the past two weeks since his return, including a ramp for the garage step, a fully functioning bow and arrow for The Boy's friend when he came to play, bike repairs and tumble dryer repairs.  

Investigating a family of beetles.

This morning's dry rice play turned into soggy rice and rose petal play this afternoon.

The girls took themselves outside first thing this morning to build fairy houses in the garden.  I couldn't bring myself to call them in for school work as the sun was shining and the garden was just beautiful, so they spent all day making these awesome houses complete with mini-ponds and washing lines.

This afternoon/evening The Boy and Papa went swimming while the two eldest went to their tap dancing, modern dancing and then their gymnastics lessons.  Panda Girl missed her gym lesson today as she has conjunctivitis, something she suffers with a fair amount due to a tiny spare-tear duct she has on the side of her nose.  Conjunctivitis aside, the tear duct itself is incredibly cute and completely cool :)

Rainbow Mosaic and Rainbow Food Colouring Play

The girls studied a poem about a rainbow yesterday and The Boy joined in with a rainbow mosaic, a pot of gold and some letter matching.

...and a golden glittery sun.

The Boy did some rainbow drop-painting after lunch today. Fun!

Here he is saying "oh my days!"

The girls had a go too.  

We talked about osmosis in the above activity and then prepared some flowers in food colouring to demonstrate the process,

The Boy wrote '2' so we would know that the flowers went in the coloured water at 2pm :)

Monkey Girl has a bone collection (as you do).  We added a macaw feather to our feather collection following our safari park trip last week.

Late this afternoon the weather was great.  It seemed that chores should be outside ones today :)

They worked hard and were rewarded with cupcakes made by Mummy and an evening picnic in the park...

...where we collected elderflowers for elderflower cordial

Today's sunset.

 Coloured rice play for the Boy in the morning

A Birthday!

My Monkey Girl is 10!  She is the biggest fan of Steve Backshall's 'Deadly Sixty'.  Happy Birthday Sunbeam :)

We headed to off to Surrey where Uncle Connor was in charge of a bar-b-q to celebrate her birthday and also that of what have would been my parent's 39th Wedding Anniversary.  R.I.P. Dad.  We missed you.

Nanny Mo and two of her 10 grandchildren.

Uncle Thomas and his clone.

Birthday Girl and her sisters

A bit o' frisbee

And today Monkey Girl had her closest friends over to end the Birthday weekend in style :)

Safari Park Day

And so the Birthday celebrations begin!  Monkey Girl (so-named for her continued apparent weightlessness when she clings on like a monkey for hugs and cuddles) turns 10 tomorrow and so we took a day off to visit the safari park.

I cleverly forgot to take the aerial off the car.  We were the most popular car in Monkey Jungle and Ballet Girl suggested may be I should have considered the aerial before we went it.  The number of monkeys jumping on and off the car and travelling around the enclosure with us on our roof was well worth our 'snapped-in-half' aerial!

We managed to plan our day to fit in seeing: squirrel monkey feeding, penguin feeding, lemur feeding, birds show, bird of prey show, the sealion show, and the elephant show

Monkey Girl managed to get herself chosen as helper in the elephant show. :)